William Vaughan (merchant)

Born on 22 September 1752, he was the second son of Samuel Vaughan, a merchant in London and Jamaica, by his wife Sarah, daughter of Benjamin Hallowell of Boston, Massachusetts.

[1] In April 1782 Vaughan travelled to Amsterdam to meet John Adams, as part of the negotiations to end the American War of Independence.

During the Nore mutiny in 1797, Vaughan formed one of the committees of London merchants convened to meet at the Royal Exchange to deal with it.

[1] From 1793 to 1797 Vaughan published a series of pamphlets and tracts advocating the construction of docks for the Port of London.

[1] Later that year he was on the committee planning docks, with Robert Milligan, George Hibbert and Beeston Long.

He was also a member of the Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor, which was instrumental in 1815 in establishing the first savings bank in London, at Leicester Place in Westminster.